


where it once was forgotten

by TimeTurnedFragile



Series: you never get used to it, you just have to live with it [2]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Captivity, Gen, Government Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Rescue, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 18:15:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19214878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TimeTurnedFragile/pseuds/TimeTurnedFragile
Summary: Roger told Brian he slept for six days after the doctors did it. Brian didn’t remember. He remembered waking up.





	where it once was forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> last fic was more a specific day, whereas this is more of a broad view. i hope that makes sense, let me know if anything needs clarifying. also let me know if it needs more warnings. cheers, and i hope you like it.

Roger told Brian he slept for six days after the doctors did it. Brian didn’t remember. He remembered waking up.

 

* * *

 

 

Brian woke up thinking Roger was talking. It didn’t make as much sense as usual, and Brian tried to say, “Rog? Roger, are you okay?”

 

His throat was dry and just the attempt to talk sent an almost unbearable pain arching through his skull. Brian brought a hand to his head, whimpering, and felt the scars. He didn’t remember starting to scream, but he remembered trying to stop, trying and trying, and then being stopped, by the guards and their trusty sticks.

 

* * *

 

 

The second time he woke up, he realized two things: first, Roger wasn’t the only voice he could hear, and second, he was still alone in his cell, just like he had been before the-- Before whatever this was. He didn’t touch his head again. He didn’t trust himself not to scream.

 

Roger wasn’t the only voice, but he was the voice that Brian was most familiar with, and the voice that was loudest in his sheer panic regarding Brian. Brian wanted to say, “I’m here, I’m okay,” but he wasn’t sure either was true, and he was too scared to risk trying to talk again.

 

He closed his eyes and tried to listen to Freddie. Freddie was scared, too, but he was distracting himself with thoughts of art. Freddie was cold. Brian thought he might be too, but for the moment, the pain and disorientation of sharing his head was distracting from that particular problem. Freddie had a whole story going, like a motion picture, sort of, and Brian had the vague sense that it was wrong to watch, but he couldn’t make himself pull away.

 

* * *

 

 

They let Brian out of his cell the third time he woke up. He made it all of three steps before the noise of everyone in the complex, scared and alone and in pain, rolled over him like a wave. Then he went to his knees, vomited, and promptly passed out.

 

* * *

 

 

Evidently, that hadn’t been exactly what the “doctors” were going for. At least, Brian had to presume that, since they gave him a paralyzing agent and cut into him again, asking questions in between his screams.

 

At first he’d thought, surely,  _surely_  they would get that he couldn’t form words, could barely  _think_  through the agony. Only, when he kept not answering, one of the leaned down and said, “You don’t really want us to make it worse, do you?”

 

The question echoed, the man’s voice and mind asking it all at once and Brian begged like he hadn’t since the beginning, since he hadn’t known better. The man said, “Answer the question.”

 

Brian couldn’t  _remember_  the question, couldn’t remember any of the questions. He tried telling them this. It got worse.

 

* * *

 

 

It hurt to concentrate, but not concentrating was out of the question. Not concentrating meant taking everyone else’s thoughts on, and Brian had already learned that lesson. So he concentrated.

 

It took a lot of effort. Too much effort to concentrate  _and_  eat, for example, or concentrate  _and_  talk. The first time Roger put a hand on Brian’s shoulder, Brian whimpered and Roger snatched the hand back. Brian wanted to apologize, but that took too much energy away from the task at hand.

 

Roger’s touch came creeping back, and with it, something that felt a little soothing. Mostly, Roger was an overlay of terror, but underneath, there was warmth, a bond that sounded like a hum of  _RogerBrian BrianRoger,_ a bond Brian had always been certain would last their whole lives. Brian concentrated on that, and the hurt leeched away, just a bit, enough to breathe.

 

* * *

 

 

There wasn’t enough concentration in the world to shut Freddie out when they took him.

 

* * *

 

 

The first time Brian was a little glad, just a little, that he could  _hear_  when Freddie woke up, scared and not alone in his own head. Brian wasn’t sure if he could do it,  _knew_  it was going to hurt like hell, but he thought, “Freddie,” in the direction he supposed Freddie to be.

 

Even with the hubbub of other voices, voices Brian was working hard to quiet, he heard Freddie’s sharp silence in response. Then, after a long moment, a hesitant, “Brian?” followed by pain so bad Brian doubled up. It was familiar pain, but it wasn’t his own pain.

 

Brian sent the message, “It gets easier.”

 

Freddie didn’t send anything back, but the fear quieted, just a bit. Brian stayed with him.

 

* * *

 

 

Brian screamed when they took Roger, screamed and cried and threw himself at the door and then begged when they came to shut him up. One of the guards just dug his fingers into the soft, healing parts of Brian’s head. Brian called to Roger right before he passed out, but Roger couldn’t hear—not yet.

 

* * *

 

 

Brian and Roger stayed with Freddie, tried to take the worst of it, when they took John. Brian was sick from the pain, from biting into his arm so as not to scream, from Freddie’s terror. He couldn’t think, couldn’t focus, but he stayed with Freddie, stayed all the way through.

 

* * *

 

 

Freddie thought in terms of songs a lot. It had taken Brian a while to figure it out, figure out why he had songs stuck in his head that he didn’t know, until he realized it wasn’t his head. He said, one day at the dinner table, “You have good taste in music.”

 

Freddie blinked several times and then smiled. It was awkward, like he couldn’t remember how, but Brian knew it was real—the tempo of Freddie’s song picked up.

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes, Brian would think of a song that Freddie hadn’t heard. Freddie called it “file sharing.” They tried to learn to focus on songs during the worst of the experiments, all of them. Nobody wanted the others in on that.

 

It worked, at least a little, until Brian started forgetting songs. He didn’t even notice at first, just thought that he couldn’t concentrate. They’d broken something in his leg, put something in there, maybe fixed the leg, Brian couldn’t tell, it hurt too much to care. He couldn’t think of a song, but he figured that it was all just a little too much.

 

Until he woke up in his cell, sharp agony radiating from the leg and he couldn’t think of a song, not one. He was starting to panic, breaths coming shorter, when all three of the others burst past the shields he’d started learning to erect. They were still weak, but he was pretty sure it made it better for the others. Freddie was learning, too. The others would. Brian wasn’t sure which was worse—being there with them, or not.

 

Then there were three songs, overlapping, clashing -- the most dissonant of sounds, but also the most beautiful in their fierce, shared desire to help. Brian would have smiled and laughed if he thought it wouldn’t jostle his leg. Instead, he hummed along.

 

* * *

 

 

By the time Brian couldn’t even remember the tune to the alphabet, or Happy Birthday, Roger had started thinking only in beats, and John in snippets of lyrics that he couldn’t figure out context to. Freddie could still recall certain stanzas, but that was about it. The four of them tried to keep those safe, collectively.

 

Brian tried his hardest to hold on to those notes, but they would keep disappearing, and with them, Brian’s ability to feel anything outside the thrum of pain that was constant, even when it wasn’t wholly his. He stored up the moments when he could do something outside of breathing for when the others needed something, when the need was strong enough to keep him alive inside himself.

 

In the middle of one of the worst sessions, Brian started to just let go, let the pain win, let it  _finish_  this, Freddie broke past whatever defenses Brian had left and promised, “You die and I will find your dead arse and remember the tune to the neverending song and sing it to you for the rest of fucking eternity, darling.”

 

Brian kind of liked the idea of Freddie being with him forever after, but he took the point, and did his best to stay in the here.

 

* * *

 

 

It had been a while since Brian had had problems with his shields, but he woke to confusion and disgust so intense that it caused him to whimper, and dig his fingers into his own skull. He didn’t know these voices, he didn’t know them at all, why were they here?

 

An immaculately dressed man said, “Get these people the fuck out of here and to a hospital. Now.”

 

Other people, also well-dressed and professional looking scurried around, and Brian tried to get their franticness out of his head, tried to find Roger and Freddie and John, but everything was too loud. He might have screamed at them to stop it, maybe, but they didn’t, and after a while it was too much, too much and he rolled on the ground, right onto the shoulder they’d recently been working on, and that got it to stop, along with everything else.

 

* * *

 

 

Brian had no idea where he was when he woke up. He had no idea where Roger or Freddie or John were, either—he couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear anything, actually, his own thoughts and the beep of several machines that didn’t seem to be hurting him. He blinked at the machines and wondered wearily what they were doing, if not hurting him. He didn’t hurt at all, actually, which was almost as scary as it was relieving.

 

A man, a little bit older than Brian, walked in the room, and Brian could  _hear_  him, just fine. He said, “I’m Jim. Uh, Dr. Beach, but I’m not really used to that, so.”

 

Brian swallowed. Talking to doctors was not advisable, even if this one felt harmless, inside his mind. He seemed to want to  _help_. Brian wanted to ask about the others, but he didn’t know what would or would not get them into trouble.

 

The doctor said, “We found all their notes. It’s going to take a while to sort out what the hell they were doing, make it better for you guys, but for the moment, we’ve got you all in separate rooms that are running sort of the biomagnetic version of white noise so you can get some peace and quiet.”

 

That explained a lot. Brian still wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, but he could try and believe. The doctor hesitated. “When Ph— Mr. Freestone, when he took over the company, he didn’t know. He didn’t know at all. It was supposed to just be biotech engineering. Not this.”

 

Brian had no idea what that meant, but he wasn’t going to ask, no more than he was going to ask for water. Instead, he closed his eyes a little, and waited until the doctor left to give into sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

Brian was in a bigger room, and he could hear the others when he woke up. Which made sense, because they were in the room with him, he saw, when he opened his eyes. Freddie caught that Brian was awake and grinned at the thought, “Deaky asked.”

 

Of course he had. Deaky was too stupidly brave for anyone’s own good. Brian smiled back. Whatever they were keeping him on, it was hard to even feel his face, but he had the sense that was a good thing. “Where are we?”

 

“Research hospital, I think. There are doctors, and Freestone Inc., biomedical technologies, or something.” Freddie’s thoughts came slowly, with stutters and stops, but Brian was glad. He wasn’t sure he could process that much information if it came all in a rush.

 

After a long, long time, he got up the nerve to ask, “Safe?”

 

They both blinked when they realized Brian had spoken aloud. He hadn’t, not in months, maybe not a year. It was hard to know how much time had passed. Roger woke at the sound and yawned, looking over to check first on Brian, then on John, then on Freddie. Satisfied, he closed his eyes again.

 

Freddie whispered. “I… I think so, darling, maybe. I hope.”

 

Brian reached out for Freddie’s hand and thought _hope._ He never thought he’d ever think something like that again. Freddie squeezed his hand back, like he understood. 


End file.
